Ads that Talk Back: Exploring Media Advertising through Drama with Inner-City Students

by Diane Conrad

This reflective practice case study completed for my master's degree involved creating and delivering a unit for inner-city high school students integrating drama and media literacy/production with a focus on advertising. It used socially critical or issues- based drama to examine the relationship between youth and media advertising, to draw out and question their meanings/understandings, towards finding appropriate ways of teaching media studies. Analysis of students' responses to the work and the media messages they created saw these young people as sophisticated readers of advertisements who made meanings that spoke to their needs, desires and life experiences. The study forced a re-evaluation of the critical perspective brought to the teaching, which led to a more pluralistic stance that allowed the intersection of public and private realms of knowing and the acknowledgement of students' desiring identities. In representing the research data the study took an alternative arts-based approach by depicting significant teaching/learning moments through scripted scenes.

172 pages, Paperback

Published July 14, 2010

About the author

Diane Conrad is an associate professor of drama/theatre education at the University of Alberta. Her participatory, arts-based research involves work with high-risk and incarcerated youth. She is the director of the Arts-based Research Studio at University of Alberta. Her recent publications include Athabasca’s Going Unmanned: An Ethnodrama about Incarcerated Youth (2012).